Snowden & Manning: Could the Debate on National Security Happen Any Other Way?

The national-security bureaucracy and its sweeping powers are not much different from the domestic regulatory state, in that the former, like the latter, tends to grow and assume more power over time in an organic fashion. A bureaucracy is created to address some crisis, but once that crisis has ended, the bureaucracy remains and finds new work for itself. Containing a bureaucracy is always hard, even where no secrecy is involved.

Here’s the picture to keep in mind when considering today’s national-security apparatus. First, most of it was built during the Cold War for the purposes of winning that conflict. The National Security Agency’s prowess with intercepting electronic communications of all kinds had a particular purpose. Every foreign government and non-state entity was fair game, though neither foreign nationals nor their signals were necessarily geographically restricted. There was always incidental pickup of U.S. citizen communications.

Second—and this is a point brought out in Barton Gellman’s invaluable book Angler—the national-security reforms of the Watergate era branded the brains of Republicans like Dick Cheney. They saw two presidents, Nixon and Ford, crippled in their ability to wage the Cold War by legislative meddling. Cheney, for one, believed that the presidency and the agencies serving it had to be restored to the level of power they had wielded before Nixon’s disgrace.

Third, prosecutors and investigators at all levels have a professional interest in wider surveillance, and long before 9/11 they were fishing for pretexts that might reward them with Patriot Act-like powers. Threats of turn-of-the-millennium terrorism looked like a magic lamp that might grant every wish, but it turned out to take a real act of terrorism on 9/11 to fulfill long-thwarted professional fantasies. After 9/11, who was going to say no? Who would dare even question the expansion of domestic surveillance and police powers?

Before 9/11, there was political will (from the likes of Cheney), technical means (the Cold War intelligence infrastructure), and professional interest (on the part of domestic law enforcement and regulators) for weakening the distinctions between foreign surveillance and domestic intelligence gathering. Until 9/11, there was also resistance—but immediately after 9/11, all that dissolved. There was no debate commensurate with the gravity of what was being done. Congress was compliant and the press, including the nascent blogosphere, was doubly so. Pundits were falling over one another in those days to see who could endorse torture quickest.

A dozen years later, a great many Americans would like to have the debate that wasn’t heard in 2001. But the laws and executive decisions made a decade ago involved—sometimes with good reason, sometimes with no reason—many layers of secrecy. Debating secret actions before they were taken might have been one thing: difficult, but not impossible. But how do you debate a deep-secret state after the fact while respecting its secrecy?

There’s no lawful way to do it. The scope of the NSA’s surveillance power wasn’t a surprise to, say, James Bamford or his readers, but carefully explicated (and officially denied) analyses could never have the impact of presenting the classified material that Snowden released. Official denials were useless once Snowden went public.

One need not like the betrayals of trust and the risks imposed on innocent people by the actions of leakers like Manning and Snowden. But no one has made a plausible case that the discussion the country is having now could be taking place without them. And quite clearly the harsher critics of Snowden and Manning subscribe to Dick Cheney’s mentality: they would prefer that these questions never come to light and that the executive branch have only token accountability to Congress and the public. That’s a point of view, but not one consistent with free and representative government.

The debate on what surveillance powers over citizens its proper for government to have, and what safeguards must be in place, must take place. And it’s taking place now under the only terms on which it can happen at all.

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11 Responses to Snowden & Manning: Could the Debate on National Security Happen Any Other Way?

It is tragic for a country once believing almost religiously in liberty, that a unaccountable totalitarian secret government grew in the shadows, until it overshadowed democratic governance and supplanted the Constitution with its contrary imperatives.

I’m still holding reservations against Snowden until all facts come clear but this is a strike against our government which is becoming more tyrannical by the year. And this started with the Bush era as well and possibly before.

A nation will fall on its own sword eventually when it becomes powerful enough. Demonstrated in history. I wrote a novel about the scenario. Apathy + corruption will result in complacence which precedes the death of a nation. As Rome.

I fear my novel is becoming a reality as the government continues to thrust into a people whose attention is largely diverted by Facebook and the Kardashian sisters. The simple fact is most Americans really don’t care and this, like my writing predicts, will lead to our undoing.

Charles Hurst. Author of THE SECOND FALL. An offbeat story of Armageddon.

Granted, this debate could not have occurred
unless encapsulated in a simplistic narrative drama —
Snowden (as hero/villain) vs. The State (as villain/hero) —
to embody the complex issues involved.

But understanding context is vital, and the
(necessary) Narrative Form severely distorts the context.

Your article is “too long”, “too boring”, and “too complex”
to impact the Mainstream Mudwrestling in the center ring.
Yet still, it misses most of the Techno-Institutional context.

For those vanishing Americans who can still tolerate context
(both of you), consider what has long been public:

The 1993 Computer-assisted Crises — warned of the growing
Public/Private Panoptic enclosure movement,
the fatal attraction of “Surveillance Subsidies” via which
Americans will pay to ensure their own comfortable incarceration,
and the Political Economy of Encryption.

Finally, on the broader social dynamics, note that Snowden’s generation
grew up with the fantasy of a friendly, feel-good “private” net:
users could control what they revealed to their gated-“communities”
on their narcissistic Facebook pages.
And occasional abuses by Corporations and Private Actors
could be shouted down with righteous, adolescent, crowd-sourced anger.

And now, they bring those unrealistic expectations to the voting booth:
They want both Security, Privacy, and all the benefits of digital tech,
with none of the costs (social or toxic chemical).

There must be some Technological Fix!
(Edmund Burke’s notion of character discipline as the price
to earn our freedom, fails Marketing’s consumer-acceptance tests.)

“To the extent that the threats against which a given government
protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own
activities, the government has organized a protection racket.”
— War Making and State Making as Organized Crime
(Charles Tilly, 1985)

But of course, it’s not a monolithic “Given Government”.
Rather, the Inequality that most threatens liberty
may be the bifurcation between the contented herd of Eloi sheeple,
and the cyber-stasi Morlocks.

With that in mind (and recalling the function of “Surveillance Subsidies”),
some insights on current adaptations to ensure Stability can be found atThe Stability Trap.

(Finally, another soul who may recognize the value of Mancur Olson’s
insights re Stationary Bandits, although he neglects to
note the parallels between Roving Bandits and the Davos crowd.)

Things fall apart; the civilian Centers — of corrupt global power
structures — can hold together only by the Gravity of their own vices
(Economic Intel) — and by projecting threatening images of The Other Enemies.

While I agree that the debate would not be taking place without the leaks, in my view, Manning and Snowden are two quite different fish.

Manning has a range of personal issues that influenced what he did. He doesn’t seem to be quite at home in his own skin if the latest revelations are accurate. Manning was an unhappy, confused young man, more like a kid, who due to the US Army’s approach to intelligence analysis had wide access to a lot of information. As a serving soldier he should have known better, but probably thought that in the end everyone “would understand”, and he’d be a hero. The corrupting political context of the Iraq war is important here as well. His dump of information was unfocused for the most part and extensive. Would he do it all again? I doubt it.

Snowden on the other hand is the latest in an unprecedented line of NSA-related whistleblowers (Binney, Wiebe, Tice, Drake) who have been warning about what they see as unconstitutional and illegal overreach by the US executive branch in establishing total domestic surveillance. Snowden was living a happy, established life in Hawaii with his beautiful girlfriend making big bucks, making him the opposite of Manning. Snowden was essentially set for life, but he, like the other NSA whistleblowers, saw what was going on around them. What they were part of, and this goes far beyond the Iraq War, was a gross betrayal of not only the purpose of the NSA, but of the American people and their constitution.

So, the question for them was: where does one’s loyalty ultimately lie? Obeying the orders of a president and his followers who are operating in secret, with little or no effective oversight, using a bureaucracy which has its own corrupting agenda? Or with that officer’s/enlisted man’s oath “to protect and defend the constitution of the US against all enemies foreign and domestic” . . . ? Snowden acted out of principle which is why he has no second thoughts about it. His release of information has been very focused and gradual. He and the other NSA-related whistleblowers would do it all again, and again, and again . . . imo.

as I have previously posted on other blogs, after reading Bamford’s (The Puzzle Palace) in the late 80’s, this stuff (domestic surveillance) all but began when Harry Truman signed the NSA in to existence. I am not a fan of the NSA or overreaching/unchecked government snooping, but technology is what has changed. when the NSA was created there were no cellular phones and there was no internet/email. like it or not, fair or unfair; the bad guys have benefited from advances in technology. ergo, I have always accepted that we really don’t live in a free society, and as with malfeasance and corruption in DoD procurement, Medicare/Medicaid, Food Stamps/Section 8 Housing, etc.; if you want an omelet you’re gonna break a few eggs. to wit; bureaucrats and intelligence agencies are not perfect (or honest), but technology pretty much is. again, this is a Casablanca issue; “…I am shocked to learn there is gambling going on at Rick’s!”

This article hits the nail on the head. Even as a liberal, I was perturbed about Obama’s remarks about “welcoming a debate” on government surveillance even as he shows no mercy towards the leakers. “Well sure, now I’m ready to talk about the problem, now that you’ve discovered that I was hiding it the whole time.” He didn’t create the issue, but he certainly is perpetuating it.

The government likes to claim that it’s not violating privacy because it only collects this bit of data or that bit of data, but once all that individual data is put together it can turn into quite a lot. Would anyone actually feel like they have any privacy if there were someone following them at every moment they left the house? Yet, with a wide enough scope of cameras and a smart enough computer system, it would be possible to that en masse.

I won’t claim to be a strict constitutionalist, but the founders could not have predicted how technology affects our lives. Therefore, if Obama wants a real debate, what we need is something like a privacy Bill of Rights, that enumerates what expectations of privacy we do have that the government can never (legally) violate, and what the government must disclose. We shouldn’t have to wait for the next leaker to find out what the government is doing. That’s not how democracy works.

It is tragic for a country once believing almost religiously in liberty, that a unaccountable totalitarian secret government grew in the shadows, until it overshadowed democratic governance and supplanted the Constitution with its contrary imperatives.

I am not convinced that such a position was ever a majority view at least in particulars (if you ask someone in the abstract, the response will always be pro-freedom). After all, a bunch of founders gave us the Sedition Act, which was significantly worse than anything we have today.

Americans live in a historical bubble. We’ve never had the boot of monstrous dictators on our neck, or invasion-minded neighbors just across a line in the dirt. We have no cultural memory of what it’s like to have a government fall completely apart, then reconstitute itself in a form that dictates new definitions of the word “illegal.” Thus, most Americans shrug off our “surveillance state” with the words, “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” They don’t know what it’s like to have the word “wrong” turn against their peaceful, law-abiding little lives.

“…the Sedition Act, which was significantly worse than anything we have today.”

The legal theories we have today are built on legal precedents and Presidential decrees dating back to the Civil War, and before.

The weight of the past is cumulative, so that what we have built up to today is what Senator Church warned as “turnkey totalitarianism.”

Army lawyer and legal historian, Todd Pierce explains the legal theories we have now as a result, and the threat is chilling, because the legal authority is now in place, through precedents and current legislation, and the legal theories that rest on previous practice now extended into new spheres.

“After 9/11, President George W. Bush turned to Civil War precedents to create military tribunals for trying alleged “terrorists.” But in applying those draconian rules to a worldwide battlefield, he created the nightmarish potential for a global totalitarianism, as retired U.S. Army JAG officer Todd E. Pierce explains.”